Reasons why this winter should blow me

OK, first off, a quick note in defense of the Celtics. For those of you not paying attention, the Celtics have won three of their last four with two starters out, and a third playing on one leg. Last night, that third didn't play at all, and Paul Pierce was out for long stretches in foul trouble, and the Celtics beat the Jazz by 20. I realize that there may only be three Celtics fans left in the world, but just so the rest of you know, the Celtics are showing signs of a pulse.

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Back to the titled subject, Reasons why this winter should blow me:

1. No Snow. Look, if I wanted warm winters I'd live in Florida. I like changes in season, it keeps things fresh. Even when it's been cold this winter there's been no snow. I literally have ZERO snow right now. It's the end of February in Maine for fuck's sake.

2. The moron in charge has once again cut our programs, to "Save Money". Seriously, have we ever had a more incompotent president? I mean, is too hard for people to remember that when Clinton left office he might have taken the keyboards, but he left a budget surplus? This was only a few years ago people.

3. I've not been skiing yet. This is closely associated with number one, but that alone isn't enough of an excuse. Hopefully this will be remedied tomorrow, when I plan on coming down with a case of the "too sick to work must go skiing" bug that's going around. But as of yet, it hasn't happened yet. And one of the primary reasons I like winter is skiing.

4. Did pitchers and catchers report yet? For the first year that I can recall, I'm not excited about the upcoming baseball season. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I don't plan on playing this year or maybe it's because I am completely fucking sick of Red Sox fans and they're incessant, illogical whining about Johnny Damon. Maybe all of this will change once I see the latest Fantasy Team that wears pinstripes this year, but I doubt it.

5. Money is tight. Apparently, and nobody told me this, buying a house is really expensive. I thought that I had planned everything, but apparently my math skills suck. The mortgage, home insurance, taxes... I was prepared for all of this. I wasn't prepared for the butt raping that is my oil bill, nor was I ready for Sewer, Water, blah blah blah. Last night, I went through and built a monthly budget spreadsheet to help control costs. That was fun.

6. Grant writing is fun. Look, I work for federal grant funded programs. We have to write grants to get our money. I can deal with this. We aren't allowed to use money from those grants to write those grants. I understand this too, unfair competition and all that. What I don't understand is why the University is to cheap to pay for our time while we write the grant. They make millions from these grants. They would have to pay roughly $7,000 in salary time to the three of us that worked on the grants. We give them 8 percent of our grant every year for, well, office space and the right to use their name on our letterhead. This amounts to, over the life of the grant, a bit less than 500,000. But the U won't pay for our salary time, so we have to use vacation time. In other words, in the last two months, I have been on vacation for four weeks of it, and in that four weeks, I have worked almost 300 hours. Let's just say that I've had better vacations.

So in closing, this winter can, as was said so eloquently in that oh so classic movie,

SUCK ME BEAUTIFUL

End rant. For now.